Collaboration takes place whenever humans and/or computer applications work together to accomplish a common goal or compatible goals. For the last two decades, many organizations and individuals have considered electronic collaboration of distributed teams one way to achieve higher productivity and improve the quality of their work products. Various collaboration technologies have been introduced to provide solutions in the areas of electronic communication, coordination, and content sharing. However, comprehensive solutions that fully realize the promises of electronic collaboration remain an elusive goal.
Computerized workflow systems allow for collaboration that can be organized, structured and repeated, all of which supports accountability and efficiency. Of course, even with a single actor, workflow systems have benefits in the organization and structure of work. In some workflow systems, workflow is a structured into instances and in a large structured workflow system, thousands of workflow instances might be processed daily.
A workflow item is a unit of a workflow system. A workflow item might represent a task that involves interaction among participants. Examples of tasks might be a team leader assigning an operation to a team member, doing the operation (performed by the team member assigned to the operation), reviewing the results of the operation (performed by a reviewer who might be the team leader, the team member or another person), signing off on the completion of the operation, tracking the task, etc.
A workflow process is a collection of tasks and links between them, where a link might provide order dependencies among tasks, rules and/or data to link tasks. For example, the tasks listed above might be part of a process wherein the team leader assigns, which triggers the start of the doing of the operation, the completion of which triggers the need for review, which must occur before the signing off, while tracking can be done between the assignment and the signing off (or some other rule might apply). One workflow process might be reused many times for unrelated operations. Operations themselves might be performed using workflow processes, typically depending on complexity.
A workflow system provides each participant with an interface where actions to be done might be presented, prioritized and tracked. A workflow system might be organized in a client-server structure, with the server maintaining process templates, instances of ongoing processes, workflow items for each user and logic to present a user with his or her workflow items, via a client system. SAP's Netweaver™ system provides an example of a workflow system.
Structured workflow has advantages of being trackable and testable. Structured workflow is trackable in that an analyst can later determine how a process proceeded and can identify other performance data and data underlying the work being done. In a typical arrangement, users have access to structured systems, such as a workflow management system and communication systems such as e-mail systems, instant messaging systems, and the like. In such environments, the communication system is used by collaborators for messaging, but might on occasion be used for noncommunication actions, such as tasks. For example, a team leader might send an e-mail to a team member requesting the start of an operation, then the team leader might separately follow up with review of the operation manually, which leads to difficulties in tracking operations, auditing and other benefits of a structured workflow.